Posts Tagged ‘startups’

Finally I finished reading Founders at Work. My biggest take away? It is incredibly hard to bring your startup to success. You need to work super hard for a few years and have incredible amount of perseverance and passion. And I doubt it is only the examples Jessica Livingston shows us in the book. It even discouraged me a bit to start a “real” startup.. At least without a strong co-founder or a very very good idea.

Building a startup is not about getting rich easily. If this is your main goal, you’re going to fail. You need to love what you’re doing and want to change the world. The money might come as a nice side effect. If you’re lucky.

The second thing I realized is the are million and one way to build a startup. If someone says something doesn’t work, he might actually mean, “It didn’t work for me.” It might work just fine for you though. And the other way round as well; purely replicate someone else without paying close attention to your own situation will kill you.

Brewster Kahle, WAIS Internet Archive, Alexa

“The Macintoshes were helpful because they had TCP/IP for them, where Windows didn’t. It wasn’t until Windows 95 came out 6 years later that Microsoft caught up.”

It made me think: Will Microsoft catch up again when there’s enough money in this “new web” stuff?

“We’re now in 2006, and it’s hard to believe how pathetic things are. We don’t even have books online yet. I don’t know why the world moves so slowly. Everybody says, ‘Oh, it’s moving so fast.’ And it’s like, ‘No, I don’t think so. It’s been forever.'”

Hi there! I’m Jan Kubr, mainly a Ruby/Ruby on Rails developer from Prague. See my professional summary or my LinkedIn profile. I write about Ruby and RoR at jan on ruby and here about everything else. If you want to know more, feel free to contact me via Flempo. Cheers.